Monday, June 18, 2007

Riding for fun is kind of strange to me. I'm not very good at it -- I tend to stop too soon, so it's not much of a workout. I guess that's why it's "for fun."

Saturday Linnea and I "rode" the Mt Snow XC course, which turned out to suck mightily. I'll be interested to see how much they improve it for nationals -- yes, I know mountain biking is supposed to be hard, but no one not named Hans Rey can ride straight up a washed out stream bed, which is what some of the climbs seemed to be. I would suggest that these guys try installing something called a "water bar" so they wouldn't have to "rebuild" their "trails" every summer.

The downhills really weren't much better, terribly eroded and also virtually unridden this year. The 1000 feet of climbing, per lap, was about as bad as you might expect. In summary, I'd say the course has a miserable skulls-to-beers ratio... say 4 skulls to 1 beer or so. Which is a long-winded (and also very cool) way of say it's hard but not fun.

Afterward I honed my five-step stair-drop skills with Linnea doing camera duty. It turns out when I'm concentrating I make a lame face. I'll share it with you:

You might not think it's that bad, but there were no less than seven photos of me doing this, and they have my face looking... stupid. This is actually the least-stupid of the bunch. Whatever, you're probably ugly too.

As long as I'm complaining about Mount Snow, I'd advise anyone up there for nationals avoiding "Dos Gringos" Mexican restaurant. Four dollars for the same crappy chips and salsa that every other Mexican joint gives away for free?? You've got to be kidding. I would have more detailed kvetching about the place but I did have a good margarita there that dulled the memories of everything else being terrible.

After a less than restful night camping in the national forest (thanks, 2 am dirt bikers!) Linnea and I hit up Putney to preride next weeks Root 66 course. Yes, that's right, I had a weekend off from racing so I decided to go preride race courses. Anyway, the Putney course was a great ride after Mount Snow, plenty of climbing and also some pretty sweet singletrack. Singlespeed friendly (*cough* Justin, race, damnit *cough*) although I did put it in my granny ring for one section.

I didn't actually end up riding that much over the weekend, and my knee felt like crap despite that. I was feeling pretty down about bikes today until I decided that I would hit up the Fells tonight and ride hahd, as they say around here. Seems like hammering is actually better for my knee than riding slow, or at least it makes the rest of me hurt enough I don't notice.

So I killed it pretty darn well, in my humble opinion, for two laps of the Fells in around 70 minutes. Since reading about other people's good training rides is almost as boring as reading about their watts, perhaps I can illustrate how I threw it down at the fells tonight: